A few days ago, I met someone, a poet, who writes a poetry blog. While chatting with him, I told him that I am not into contemporary poetry - particularly if it is English. I love Tagore, Nazrul, Sukanta and particularly Jibananda (and maybe some Neruda and Langston Hughes in small doses) but that's about it.
He listened attentively and smiled. Then he gently asked me if I was an IT guy. When I confirmed, he said that he found IT people to be less interested in poetry.
The next few days I mulled over his words. I realized I did not like them. But although I knew IT people who have gone on to be novelists, directors, farmers, photographers, musicians, and other kinds of artists, I did not know one who had become a poet.
Was he right?
Poets come out of other professions all the time. William Carlos Williams, for example, was a doctor who kept index cards in his shirt pocket and wrote poems on them whenever he got a break.
(Incidentally, I first read Williams in an IT book - the front of
Linear Systems, by Stanford's Thomas Kailath.)
Noodling around the Web, I found a computer scientist who is also a serious poet. One
Richard Gabriel, once a Distinguished Engineer at Sun, now at IBM. (And now the programmer in me says, hey, if he is a poet, maybe he is not that good a programmer - did he write any interesting programs? Ha ha.)
Programming is very much a creative process, as is poetry. I can't think of a reason that programmers cannot be poets. Maybe there is something deeper going on? Or have I simply missed a lot of IT poets? Comments?
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